Canaries

(This has been sitting open on my computer for 2 weeks. It is incoherent. I’m hitting publish nonetheless.)

What are some physical signs of that our current secular millennialist insanity is fully in death spiral mode? Let me quote me, from a story I once threw up here:

The last straw was Reality’s refusal to bring about the Apocalypse. Several centuries of millennialist fervor has to go somewhere, and came to take any number of odd shapes, like the water in a balloon being squeezed. Heaven and earth, with remarkable indifference, showed no sign of passing away. We’d been promised 4 Horsemen, workers of the world casting off chains, or at least some ice caps melting. Something, some sort of comeuppance. But nope.
The children of the Puritans became the children of Marx, the environ-mental-cases, the Deconstructionists; fervor and zeal undiminished, their spirit flowed into all the isms pouring forth from the fevered imaginations of the world’s butt-hurt toddlers of all ages.
The dogmas of the abstracted are infinitely flexible. But zeal for their father’s demise consumes them, under whatever liturgical trappings this week’s catechism dictates.

Behind all the gloating and insanity are a whole lot of very hurt, very scared, and very angry children of all ages. It helps me feel more sympathetic when I keep in mind that many, perhaps most, Americans today were raised with

No or intermittent fathers
Crazy mothers (1)
Therefore: No family stability or consistency. The man of the house (if any) was not your dad; your siblings (if any) shared one parent with you. This situation mutated regularly. By the time you finally ran away from home or moved permanently into the basement, you had experienced any number of transient arrangements, each with its own rules and rulers.
No glimpse of the good, the true, and the beautiful

Even in the upper middle classes, with their higher rates of marriage and of two-parent homes, those two parents have probably made it clear to you in a million not so subtle ways that you and your happiness take a back seat to them and their supposed happiness: you were raised in daycare, had only the finest afterschool programs keeping you out of mom’s and dad’s hair, and were shipped off to a ‘good’ college as soon as possible.

Signs: a huge percentage of Americans believe as the fundamental dogma, thus incapable of refutation, that we are “destroying the planet.” Never mind that this curious phrase is never defined. It is the filter through which all ‘evidence’ is screened. Note that, for example, on the whole, forestation around the world is increasing, that the Amazon rainforest is growing back as fast or faster than it is being cut down, that the glaciers we were promised would be gone by now are still there, as are the costal cities we were told would be washed away, and you are a bad person. Note that oil pipelines are safer, on the whole, than any other way of moving oil around, or that fracking is no more destructive than any other way ever devised for getting stuff out of the ground, and you’re evil.

Certainly, one must never allow to rise to consciousness the reality that those solar panels and electric cars involve a whole lot of getting stuff out of the ground – natural gas and oil (plastics, power), common and rare earth metals (the latter resulting in massive pollution in China, because we are too squeamish to mine them here) and that those solar panels, batteries, and cars will in turn need to be disposed of, which will require more stuff to be taken out of, and put into, the ground. The proper skepticism that would greet claims that nuclear waste can be safely disposed of is nowhere to be found when the question is the inevitable damage done by going green. Wind power killing birds indifferently and in great numbers? La la la I can’t hear you!

Nope, we are destroying the planet! We’re primed for disaster, and our psyches demand we get one, even if we have to make it up ourselves.

So we did. It is extremely unlikely at this point that COVID will kill more people than the lockdowns. Even disregarding the real but difficult to measure upticks in all stress and panic related deaths – suicides, heart attacks, drug overdoses, medical problems made worse by deferred or skipped treatments, accidents – the destruction of international trade all but guarantees massive starvation and other hardship will be visited upon those third-world peasants who had only recently risen out of poverty, a rise fueled by cheap and ubiquitous shipping. Our Dickensian hand-wringing over factory conditions blinds us, it seems, to the reality that people for the last couple of centuries have flocked to factory work pretty much whenever it was available. That’s the engine that has reduced poverty, worldwide, from ‘almost everyone’ to ‘single digits.’

The canaries in this coal mine died long ago. Family, village, and church have all been forbidden to gather, gathering being the basic physical manifestation of their essence. Faces must be hidden behind face diapers of submission, because seeing face to face is how families, neighbors, and churches are what they are. Fear, panic, and submission must replace intimacy, comfort, and friendship as our basic modes of relationship.

We are in the middle of what seems to be one of those rare, brief ages where leading people think, if they think, that civilizations are robust in themselves, that not only is it unnecessary to work to keep what you’ve got, but that if you destroy what civilization you have, a better one will spontaneously arise from the rubble. Saner ages understood that maintaining any civilization at all is a full-time job. A Charlemagne ruled from the saddle at the head of an army, not because he was some sort of meanie oppressing people. He was going to rule from the saddle if he were to rule at all. And his horrible, ever-so-evil tyrannical rule lead to the Carolingian Renaissance, to the spread of the idea that things could, in fact, be better than endless, brutal, tribal warfare. We see oppression. The people at the time saw it differently. They thought Charlemagne a saint or a god.

I’ve long been amazed at how much praise exists for Sparta, nearly as dreary and miserable a civilization as I can imagine. But to contemporary and many later people, Sparta was a marvel of stability in a sea of chaos. They didn’t have revolts, tyrants, or mob rule; for centuries, their cities weren’t sacked, their weren’t men slaughtered, and their women and children weren’t sold into slavery (or worse). On a given afternoon, that had to look like a very much an improvement to your Athenian, Florentine, or Parisian.

Now? We live in fear of saying the wrong thing. A 9th century Frank or 4th century BC Spartan feared getting murdered, having his city burnt to the ground, his loved ones sold into slavery or worse, and everything he cherished destroyed. He feared this because he either saw it happen, did it to others, or heard it in tales from the cradle.

The bulwarks against people behaving as they usually did were cherished, defended, built up over generations. The king is dead, long live the king! Now, many lust for that beast, the typical human history reveals, to be released, his bloodlust fanned and fed. The original proponents of liberty, equality, and brotherhood were clearly the best educated, most enlightened, most moral people in history! Their army invaded the rural Vendee for, in this context, the crime of clinging to the proven bastions of order, those things upon which generations had relied to keep the beast at bay: family, village, and church. These peasants wanted nothing to do with the enlightened vanguard that was guillotining those who lacked proper enthusiasms and leaving religious people to starve and rot locked in decaying ships.

It was simply not enough for the Revolution to kill them. Peasants were bayoneted in the gut, so that their deaths would be agonizing and long; crowds were gathered on the riverbanks, stripped naked, the younger women and older girls raped, then all, men, women, and children, lashed together and shoved into the water to drown.

These are the representatives of the Enlightenment, far better, in their own minds, than the primitives they thus murdered. Our current self-proclaimed betters, equally certain in their superiority, dream of doing the same to us.